FISA courts at least require a judge to sign off and that judge often doesn’t give a shit about the exec branch. There are no balances in the CCP. They just inform the party representative at the company (all big companies have them) that X or Y needs to happen and it does or else the company gets shut down.

Well, FISC judges typically operate individually and deal in non-public hearings without giving opposing views a chance to be heard, with no oversight or anything.

Judges to the FISC are appointed by the Chief Justice without any further oversight and the Chief Justice is politically appointed as well. (A democratic process for nominating judges isn't easy,. but vesting the power into a single hand is questionable)

Also the low number of modified or rejected warrants is suspicious (the positive interpretation might be that warrants are well prepared and thus qualify)

For me as an foreigner to both cases, both approaches are problematic and I have no democratic influence over either process. And yeah, I trust US more to be aligned with my interests, but neither is a happy thing for me.

Valid point, but I prefer a democratic govt spying on me then a totalitarian govt with world conquer ambitions, and a history of suppressing minorities

As someone who was born and lives in neither of these countries, both have conquer ambitions and a history of suppressing minorities.

The USA is just much better at pretending everything it does is rightful.

Americans do the American Exceptionalism Poe's Law thing nonstop and I alternate between exhaustion and a sense of humor about it.

I mean, "a history of suppressing minorities" in the summer of 2020 is very funny. It does feel like Gen Z kids are aware of global events enough to not fall for this, so maybe it is ending.

The U.S. certainly invaded more countries and occupied more area than China. While mostly with support from larger number of countries (often incl. UN Security Council)

Patently false, the USA does not have conquer ambitions, all of its actions can be traced back to self defense from the beginning of WW2 to today.

China on the other hand, screams everyday how it wants to own taiwan. Aggressively threatens any country who dares to touch the south china seas, which it does not own.

But just to play devils advocate: It is highly likely that China have spies in Google and Facebook and probably USA have spies in Tik Tok and other big Chinese companies so both China and USA no matter what sw you use already know everything about you. My best argument would be: We can't allow that authoritarian country become tech superior because that will make China economically stronger than USA and than politically which will result in destruction of democracies around world.

I would be surprised if nobody within Google and co noticed data being siphoned out to China from its internal networks.

well they wouldn't be very good spies if that happened.

Look at how good russian spies were at infiltrating the gov't : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Five , and tell me that china couldn't do the same or better.

This is the 1950s though, infrastructure like Google's is surely to have logs and security teams. Unless they physically shove a USB into a production server and rip content. I'm pretty confident you could secure a data center, the only other way is to install sketchy processing chipsets that phone home or something.

You're probably right, they might have some sketchy way, but if you really wanted to see who is doing what with your data from within your data center you could really set controls to do so.

Out of all the differences between the US and China you chose to talk about imperialism and racism, some of the few things both have in common. Interesting.

Wait which one is the US ?

Your comment made my day, bravo :)

TIL the code I write has prism backdoors and my boss is hiding the national security letters from me

Well, prism was about secretly added prisms on fiber cables, so yes you won't know.

Yes, your boss is not allowed to talk to you about national security letters, unless your specific involvement is needed.

I as an outsider can't tell and have to trust. For that I have to evaluate how important your site as a target for such measures is, how likely I am the target and how likely my data is just close to a Target's data and how much of it will be in a full data grab for later usage.